Two Day Magazine

The tale of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley

“I was never attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend
And all the rest, though fair and wise, condemn
To cold oblivion...”
Epipsychidion, Percy Bysshe Shelly, 1821


Today, it is common enough: “Honey, I don’t want us to end, but I need to see other people.” Open marriages, of course, are still the exception, not the rule, and long term relationships are generally presumed to be monogamous, because such an overwhelming majority... well, are. But what of the rare couple willing to openly, honestly share their hearts and their beds with others?

It is no cause for a scandal today (or at least not much of one), but 200 years ago, such open marriages were not merely unusual; they were a mutiny against the state and the family, anarchy, sedition, and sin; an attack on society itself... except among a very small community of free-thinkers, poets, pamphleteers and polyamorous pioneers whom we can thank for demonstrating that a little ménage a trois on the weekend need not necessarily bring civilization to its knees.

Modern horror movie buffs might be surprised to know that no one exemplified this spirit of “free-love” radicalism as much as the author of the classic Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and its inspiration, her virtuoso poet husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. And, as bizarre as it may seem, it was this couple’s very fascination with the cryptic and the undead that helped keep their open relationship healthy and alive.

Romanticism’s free-love English poster-boy was Percy Shelley, the ultimate literary bad boy. He spoke out for worker’s rights, even soon after the French Revolution (and the bloody Reign of Terror that followed it), thus branding himself an anarchist in the eyes of the upper class to which he was born in 1792.  In pursuit of his radical ideals, Percy Shelly turned his back on wealth and power, forfeiting both an enormous estate and the prospect of replacing his father in the British House of Lords. His books survived being banned and burned by virtue of their sheer and unquestionable poetic beauty, articulating values (considered radical at the time) such as religious tolerance, egalitarianism (in his Mask of Anarchy and Prometheus Unbound), and gender equity (in his Laon and Cyntha) -- now firmly established fundamental principles of modern western civilization.

The Romantics, especially the Shelleys, reacted against the cold rationality of industrialism and science for its own sake, as is especially evident in Mary’s tale of a monster animated by a mad scientist, Frankenstein.

From his birth, every whim of young Percy was indulged; including a risqué curriculum of gothic horror novels and alchemical grimoires; terrifying his 4 younger sisters with hair-raising tales (poltergeists haunting their Sussex home… a man-eating giant snake that lived in the garden); a chemistry set full of gunpowder and electrical equipment. Even more potentially explosive in Regency-era Europe, as he entered Eaton College, Shelley was permitted such banned literature as the rebel Thomas Paine, the free-love guru William Godwin, and his suffragette wife Mary Wollstonecraft the elder. These naughty books were, in Eaton, a big no-no. Shelley was expelled from his university for publishing his views on atheism – one of the first Englishmen to do so. For refusing to inform on Shelley, his closest school chum, T. J. Hogg was also kicked out.

Environmentalism and anti-imperialism went hand in hand for these Romantic-era hippies. Percy also embraced the vegetarianism of the mystic-mathematician Pythagoras, and the attitude that marriage and monogamy were tools to enslave women which he discovered in the essay Political Justice, by old-guard radical William Godwin, with whom he at first exchanged letters, then visits.
 
Godwin, was the kind of literary celebrity Shelley dreamed of meeting. Percy first came to the Godwin household as a sort of disciple. To Godwin’s smoking-hot, free-thinking daughters, Mary and Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairborn, Shelley, the wild, visionary poet, was everything they had been brought up to admire. Picture Shelley as a sort of young Leonardo Dicaprio; a pale, angelic face, slender hands, a lion’s mane of fair hair, and big eyes that could blaze with manic zeal or gaze dewily with pathos. A big hit with the Godwin girls.

Unfortunately, the easy-going, free-love philosophy of Godwin did not endure when it involved his own daughter…
For a time, Percy and Mary’s clandestine and oh-so-Goth midnight heavy make-out sessions on the stone over Mary’s mother’s grave were kept secret, but not for long. Even more outrageous, Shelley ran off on a European tour with Godwin’s two teenaged celebutante daughters to set up a community of radicals including good old radical Hogg, and at times, the infamous poet Lord Byron, a.k.a. Mr. “Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know.” Daddy was furious.

Perhaps Godwin’s outrage was not entirely unfounded. Shelley’s form of free-love was not without a certain sleaze to it. Shelley had already left a wife and two children, although not without first settling on them 200 pounds per year -- about $35,000 US, today. In the course, his relationship with Mary, Shelley was frequently intimate with Claire – sometimes with Mary’s consent, sometimes behind her back. And modern historians are almost certain Shelley had a secret affair – and a secret child – kept hidden from his family.

Hogg shared Mary’s bed without a peep of complaint from Shelley (in fact, with his enthusiastic support), but as time went on in the close-knit household, Mary found she could no longer share Shelley. In the free-loving “community of like-spirits”, Claire was now the odd-woman-out. Jealousy and erotic tension were tearing the threesome apart. Claire was more hot-blooded, sensuous and voluptuous than her wan, ethereal and cerebral half-sister, with a sex drive that could not be denied (later, no less a pillar of will-power than Lord Byron himself was powerless to resist Claire once she had made up her mind to seduce him) so Shelley found an ingenious and uniquely Shelleyan means of keeping peace in this very close-knit household.

Shelley was, from childhood, a natural at provoking the superstitions of the high-strung young ladies of his era into frenzies of full-blown supernatural terror. While Mary (pregnant with their first child) slept, Shelley entertained Claire long into the night with ghost stories, sometimes until Claire was writhing on the floor, shrieking and moaning, possessed by the phantoms he would conjure. Although a century before Freud, Shelley seemed to intuitively understand how these intimate, midnight ghost-raisings, and the catharsis of nervous tension they released, acted as a social and sexual pressure valve. And, of course, these regular séances provided Shelley’s community with the research and development lab in the science of blood-curdling which would lead to Mary’s, Frankenstein, and Byron’s vampire story which would pave the way for Stoker’s, Dracula.

Mary and Percy roamed about Europe, moving and writing for the most fashionable and enlightened circles of literati, until Percy died in a shipwreck in 1822. Although bolder, Percy’s works never sold as well in his lifetime as Mary’s, and the undeniably good head on Mary’s shoulders acted as a moderating influence on her overzealous husband, whose righteous wrath at society’s injustice would otherwise have driven him into the streets to incite riots. Certainly, today’s libraries, as well as our romantic lives, are richer and more varied for Percy inspiring Mary, and for her giving encouragement, and occasionally setting boundaries to, Shelley’s wild visions of the natural, and supernatural worlds.